All of David Gross's Comments + Replies
I assume the audience here is a mix of sophisticated people who of course know all about the trolley problem, etc., and newbies who are attracted to rationalism or the LW ethos and are here to learn more about stuff. So I write in a mix of modes. I can't say I'm confident about how I navigate this... it's just kind of a gut feeling that there's room for multiple styles.
As for your first point about "...crazy quilt," I expand on this later in the essay when I discuss how responses to the trolley problems show that commonly people sometimes lean on deontolog...
For what it's worth, here's an excerpt from my book on historical tax resistance campaigns that makes a similar point:
Radical honesty means abjuring subterfuge—conducting your campaign in the open, in plain sight, without trying to take your opponent by surprise through trickery, and without trying to influence people by “spin” and lopsided propaganda. It also means studiously refusing to participate in the dishonesty by which your opponent holds on to power and deceives those who submit to it. Radical honesty has several potential advantages:
1. Honesty pr...
I just finished that book. He seems to think of practical wisdom as being what helps with things like bounded rationality, fuzzy categorization, reasoning by analogy with previous experience, and developing mastery in a craft. He gives lots of examples of how institutions degrade practical wisdom by using rules or incentives to guide people instead (e.g. the practice of medicine being taken over by insurance companies, childhood education becoming drills to cram test-taking knowledge, judges' judgement being replaced by mandatory minimum sentencing). And h...
There are some promising but under-utilized interventions for improving personality traits / virtues in already-developed humans,* and a dearth of research about possible interventions for others. If we want more of that sort of thing, we might be better advised to fill in some of those gaps rather than waiting for a new technology and a new generation of megalopsychebabies.
How robust are these calculations against the possibility that individual gene effects aren't simply additional but might even not play well together? i.e. gene variant #1 raises your IQ by 2 points, variant #2 raises your IQ by 1 point, but variants #1+2 together make you able to multiply twelve-digit numbers in your head but unable to tie your shoes; or variant #3 lifts your life expectancy by making you less prone to autoimmune disease A, variant #4 makes you less prone to autoimmune disease B, but variants #3+4 together make you succumb to the common c...
It's a good question. The remarkable thing about human genetics is that most of the variants ARE additive.
This sounds overly simplistic, like it couldn't possible work, but it's one of the most widely replicated results in the field.
There ARE some exceptions. Personality traits seem to be mostly the result of gene-gene interactions, which is one reason why SNP heritability (additive variance explained by common variants) is so low.
But for nearly all diseases and for many other traits like height and intelligence, ~80% of variance is additive. somewhere bet...
2- “[I]t is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies & to end as superstitions.” [T.H. Huxley, The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species 1880]
I was interrupted by underpants gnomes while reading this. They summarized it for me this way, but I'm sure they left the good parts out.
- Trust that organizations like hospitals, nonprofits, and state bureaucracies will self-organize towards pursuing their nominal goals, so long as they claim to be doing that, even if those bureaucracies lack strong organizational incentives to do so.
- ???
- Bizarre policies like police abolishment.
1I thought this quote was nice and oddly up-to-the-minute, from Iris Murdoch's novel The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), spoken by the character William Eastcote at a Quaker meeting:
...My dear friends, we live in an age of marvels. Men among us can send machines far out into space. Our homes are full of devices which would amaze our forebears. At the same time our beloved planet is ravaged by suffering and threatened by dooms. Experts and wise men give us vast counsels suited to vast ills. I want only to say something about simple good things which are as it were
The sequence is rationality-informed but also picks up things from folk wisdom, religious traditions, etc. when that seems helpful. It references cogsci studies and insights when those are available.
This might scratch your itch: the Notes on Virtues sequence.
Investigating a variety of human virtues, with the hope of learning how we might improve in their practice.
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I posit: high enough that you’re slightly overoptimistic about stuff you can’t control, so that for stuff where confidence itself makes the difference, you squeak in.
FWIW, see Notes on Optimism, Hope, and Trust for more on this hypothesis, including William James's speculations.
All this sounds wonderful, but reminds me of people who have amazing systems to play the stock market and leverage $1,000 to $1,000,000. Of all the people with all their systems, a few lucky ones hit the jackpot by chance, while the majority muddle through or lose it all. The lucky ones assume the market has acknowledged their financial genius and go on to tell us all about it.
If 5% of glioblastoma patients uncannily survive, how much am I supposed to update on hearing that one of those patients did some combination of plausible but undertested interventions during their recovery?
A prereminiscence: It's like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.
It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. S...
The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn't act, and the text doesn't get translated.
The popcorn map on the other hand doesn't direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.
You can say that "oh well, then, the popcorn wasn't really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that rea...
The book in the room isn't inert, though. It instructs the little guy on what to do as he manipulates symbols and stuff. As such, it is an important part of the computation that takes place.
The mapping of popcorn-to-computation, though, doesn't do anything equivalent to this. It's just an off-to-the-side interpretation of what is happening in the popcorn: it does nothing to move the popcorn or cause it to be configured in such a way. It doesn't have to even exist: if you just know that in theory there is a way to map the popcorn to the computation, then if...
This reminds me of my intuitive rejection of the Chinese Room thought experiment, in which the intuition pump seems to rely on the little guy in the room not knowing Chinese, but that it's obviously the whole mechanism that is the room, the books in the room, etc. that is doing the "knowing" while the little guy is just a cog.
Part of what makes the rock/popcorn/wall thought experiment more appealing, even given your objections here, is that even if you imagine that you have offloaded the complex mapping somewhere else, the actual thinking-action that the m...
"the actual thinking-action that the mapping interprets"
I don't think this is conceptually correct. Looking at the chess playing waterfall that Aaronson discusses, the mapping itself is doing all of the computation. The fact that the mapping ran in the past doesn't change the fact that it's the location of the computation, any more than the fact that it takes milliseconds for my nerve impulses to reach my fingers means that my fingers are doing the thinking in writing this essay. (Though given the typos you found, it would be convenient to blame them.)
...they
Crucially, the mappings to rocks or integers require the computation to be performed elsewhere to generate the mapping. Without the computation occurring externally, the mapping cannot be constructed, and thus, it is misleading to claim that the computation happens 'in' the rock or the integers. Further, Crucially, the mappings to rocks or integers require the computation to be performed elsewhere to generate the mapping. Without the computation occurring externally, the mapping cannot be constructed, and thus, it is misleading to claim that the computation happens 'in' the rock or the integers.
Either this is saying the same thing twice or I'm seeing double.
Tomasik dismisses this as ,
?
The fundamental attribution error is another important one. I sometimes find I slip into it myself when I get tired or inattentive, but for most people I observe it seems fully baked into their characters.
4Wants are emergent, complex forms of pain and pleasure. They are either felt or they are not felt, and reason only comes in at the stage of deciding what to do about them.
Are you really certain that one's desires are just givens that one has no rational influence over? I'm skeptical.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aQQ69PijQR2Z64m2z/notes-on-temperance#Can_we_shape_our_desires_
An influential ethical philosopher is on his way to address a conference of wealthy donors about effective altruism. His rhetorical power and keen arguments are such that he can expect these donors to reach deep and double their donations to yet worthier causes after his talk. On his way to the conference, however, he comes across a child drowning in a pond. He is the only one around who can save this child, but to do so, he would have to jump in the pond, ruin his humble but respectable second-hand suit, and miss the train to the conference. While he woul...
A lot of the current education system aims to give children skills that they can apply to the job market as it existed 20 years ago or so. I think children would be better-advised to master more general skills that could be applied to a range of possible rapidly changing worlds: character skills like resilience, flexibility, industriousness, rationality, social responsibility, attention, caution, etc.
Come to think of it, such skills probably represent more reliable "investments" for us grown-ups too.
Can you give examples of curriculum elements that you think are aimed at the world of 20 years ago? The usual criticism I see is that school is barely connected to the needs of the working world.
Done. Thanks for the correction.
It seems plausible to me that there is a sort of selection process in which people are creating ostensible-wisdom all the time, but only some of that wisdom gets passed along to the next generation, and the next, and so forth, while a lot of it gets discarded. If some example of wisdom is indeed ancient, then you can by virtue of that have at least some evidence that it has passed through this selection process.
To what extent this selection process selects for wisdom that actually earns that designation I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
We taboo resemblance all the time for things that refer to other things: Words, for example. The word "mouse" does not resemble a mouse, but we can usefully use the word as a reference. Words that resemble their references are a peculiar and remarkable tiny category (onomatopoeia) that are the exception to the rule.
If you thought your computer interface were an accurate picture of what is going on inside the computer, you might indeed go looking for a microscopic pointer somewhere in the wires. It's because you don't think this that you know to look for co...
It's not nonsensical. It's an assertion that can be made sense of with a little effort.
Consider the user interface analogy. On your desktop there is a mouse pointer with which you can drag a file from here to there. In the underlying computer which executes the actions which are represented by this interface, there is nothing that resembles a pointer, a dragging action, or a file. That the interface associates certain activity in the hardware with certain things that appear on the desktop is a useful convention for us, but it is not one that was designed t...
That, to me, reads like a very different statement. One I completely agree with. But different. I maintain that the very fact of the interface's usefulness demonstrates that there is enough of a resemblance to the underlying reality to create said usefulness - by giving us accurate expectations about selected aspects of the behavior of whatever is going on beneath the surface, while lowering mental overhead by abstracting away the rest.
Edit to add: side note, who says the word red has to be defined based on wavelengths in absolute terms instead of relation...
shame—no need to exacerbate such feelings if it can be avoided
Shame may be an important tool that people with dark traits can leverage to overcome those traits. Exacerbating it may in some cases be salutary.
To me, the phrase “I decided to trust her” throws an error. It’s the “decided” part that’s the problem: beliefs are not supposed to involve any “deciding”.
To trust is more than a passive cognitive reflection like a belief, it is also an action taken upon the world. This might be more easily seen if you consider the more awkward phrasing "I decided to extend my trust to her".
“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” ―Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography Ⅳ, 1791)
“[T]he majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.” ―Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1894)
“[A]n aim of philosophy is patiently and unremittingly to sustain the vigilance of reason in the presence of failure and in the presence of that which seems alien to it.” ―Karl Jaspers (Way to Wisdom, 1950)
“He who knows the truth is not equal to him who loves it, and he who loves it is not equal to him who delights in it.” ―Confucius (Analects Ⅵ.18)
“The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.” —Thomas Macaulay (“Lord Bacon” 1837)
Some considerations you might be missing:
A language, among other things, is an ongoing, long-term, collective effort by a culture to categorize understanding: to divide up what is known, knowable, (or mistaken) into chunky abstractions that can then be played with lego-style to assemble new insights, hypotheses, or what-have-you.
Each language carves up reality a little differently.
When there are more languages in use, there are more versions of this carving at play. Some languages can easily express things that other languages cannot. Some languages make d...
1Anyone else getting "ask your doctor if Photoshop™ is right for you" vibes from some of those before & after photos?
...the fact that the average life in New Zealand is much, much better than the average life in the Democratic Republic of Congo...
I think you may be in danger of overloading "better" in statements like this, and more implicitly throughout your argument. (Similarly "good" in statements like "It’s absurd to... believe[] a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income".)
Consider if I said something like this: "We are constantly told that it would be better for us if we at...
If UBI is implemented as a form of wealth redistribution -- in other words if a progressive tax fully funds the UBI payouts -- then the money supply inflation problem goes away, no? At least on the economy-wide scale.
I guess there is still the problem that at the bottom of the income scale there is now more money chasing e.g. a stickily-fixed supply of low-income housing, so the prices of such goods are likely to rise. But might some of the people who used to compete for that stock of housing also now be UBI-boosted into setting their sights on higher-quality housing and no longer be part of that competitive pool? Maybe it evens out.
What I don't see in your outline, and what I think would make your proposed manifesto stronger, would be a chapter along the lines of "this is the steelmanned case for why continuing progress in technology is problematic and dangerous and for how humanity could prosper or avoid disaster by putting the brakes on it."
Otherwise it does look like a preaching to the choir thing. Manifestos are often that sort of preaching, so maybe that's okay for what you're after, but for all the usual LW-communications-ethos reasons, I hope you decide on something better.
I've seen dukkha translated as something more like "unsatisfactoriness" which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you've been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you're dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won't make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.
My point is that in English "experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain" would be considered an uncontroversial example of "suffering", not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there's a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.
I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker "Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again" they would assume you were claiming that this would i...
There can be pain without suffering. If pain is experienced without attachment and aversion, there is no resulting suffering. If the Buddha were to stub his toe, there would be pain, but he would not suffer as a result.
I wonder whether "suffering" is an adequate translation. I get the feeling that the Buddhist sutras and our common vulgate are talking past each other. See for example MN144, in which Channa slits his wrists to end his pain, and the Buddha says he was sufficiently enlightened that he will not be reborn. Channa complains: “Reverend Sāri...
1Anselm: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for the existence of God, which this tweet is too small to contain. 🙏😇
1https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnNNGWQEX7CgaqBt2/notes-on-reverence
Excerpt:
“I am an atheist, and am addressing an audience in which, if I’m not mistaken, respect for the tenets of established religion is fairly low. But I want to explore reverence — in the spirit of Chesterton’s Fence — because it is common to many virtue systems across cultures and across time. Among the questions that concern me:
- “Are there aspects of reverence that are valuable that rationalists can preserve and nurture in their own ways in their own traditions?
- “Is reverence perhaps so
Took a couple of years, but my dystopian future has arrived:
May, 2024: Google search starts to put "AI Overviews" above its web search results. [BBC] "Google's new artificial intelligence (AI) search feature is facing criticism for providing erratic, inaccurate answers. Its experimental 'AI Overviews' tool has told some users searching for how to make cheese stick to pizza better that they could use 'non-toxic glue'. The search engine's AI-generated responses have also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day."
my current best guess
FWIW, from Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (p. 323): "If we study one moral concept we soon see it as an aspect of another. It is true on the one hand that as moral agents we tend to specialise. The high-principled statesman may be a negligent father (and so on). It may seem as if we have a limited amount of good motivation available and cannot expect to be decent 'all round'. There are familiar ways of characterising people in terms of individual characteristics. Yet also a closer look may show this as superficial, and we then wish to say that the impulse toward goodness should stir the whole person."
Some of these sentences need to be reworded such that they mean something more precisely, requiring less creative interpretation from the reader.
This post is a good example of one where AI assistance would be helpful. If you asked, say, Claude to identify the various assertions made in this post ... (read more)